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Off the Roosie
after O’Hara
I get off the 7 and head home, past the Chase and the Jackson Heights penguin
that, last week, someone dressed as a bunny, and I’m thinking
of Frankie’s I-do-this-I-do-that poems, and my phone is dead again and
I can’t afford to replace it. All I want to hear is Spoon
singing got no regard for the thing you don’t understand
but maybe, as Lorna said, it’s a gift and there’s a poem across the street
waving Yoo hoo! Over here! and trying very hard to get
my attention. I get onto 37th, near what’s left of the Brunson Building
after the fire on Easter Monday and I head past the Met (not that one)
which they renamed Foodtown but which Honor and Joe and I will
always call the Met (not that one), and then a left onto 77th
and past our coffee shop where Afsal stands outside, talking, but
for once does not say hello even though he looks
straight at me, and it’s fine, I walk past the Berkeley and over 35th Ave., and
I guess I’m home, considering that my keys have opened
the door even before I realized I had them in my hand, and everything is
where I left it, even in the bedroom where I keep waking alone quite
suddenly to find—yes, I left you. You’ve never even been here.
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KC Trommer is the author of We Call Them Beautiful (Diode Editions, 2019) and The Hasp Tongue (dgp, 2014) and is founder of the online audio project QUEENSBOUND. Since 2018, she has collaborated with the Grammy Award-winning composer Herschel Garfein on a song cycle based on poems from her first collection. Since 2020, she has curated and run the Red Door Series, a reading and meditation series at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Jackson Heights, Queens. She has been poet in residence on Governors Island since 2021, first through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s COVID-19 Response Residency Program, then through Works on Water, and now through the NYU Gallatin WetLab. She is the Director of Communications at NYU Gallatin and lives in Jackson Heights with her son. [To hear KC Trommer reading this poem, click here.]
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1941 photo showing 37 Av W. at 90th St Jackson Heights Queens New York City
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Author: Terence Winch